In the mind of contemporary man, freedom appears to a large extent as the
absolutely highest good, to which all other goods are subordinate. Court
decisions consistently accord artistic freedom and freedom of opinion primacy
over every other moral value. Values which compete with freedom, or which might
necessitate its restriction, seem to be fetters or "taboos," that is,
relics of archaic prohibitions and fears. Political policy must show that it
contributes to the advancement of freedom in order to be accepted. Even religion
can make its voice heard only by presenting itself as a liberating force for man
and for humanity. In the scale of values on which man depends for a humane
existence, freedom appears as the basic value and as the fundamental human
right. In contrast, we are inclined to react with suspicion to the concept of
truth: we recall that the term truth has already been claimed for many opinions
and systems, and that the assertion of truth has often been a means of
suppressing freedom. In addition, natural science has nourished a skepticism
with regard to everything which cannot be explained or proved by its exact
methods: all such things seem in the end to be a mere subjective assignment of
value which cannot pretend to be universally binding. The modern attitude toward
truth is summed up most succinctly in Pilate's question, "What is
truth?". Anyone who maintains that he is serving the truth by his life,
speech and action must prepare himself to be classified as a dreamer or as a
fanatic. For "the world beyond is closed to our gaze"; this sentence
from Goethe's <Faust> characterizes our common sensibility today.

Doubtless, the prospect of an all too self-assured passion for the truth
suggests reasons enough to ask cautiously, "what is truth?". But there
is just as much reason to pose the question, "what is freedom?". What
do we actually mean when we extol freedom and place it at the pinnacle of our
scale of values? I believe that the content which people generally associate
with the demand for freedom is very aptly explained in the words of a certain
passage of Karl Marx in which he expresses his own dream of freedom. The state
of the future Communist society will make it possible, he says, "to do one
thing today and another tomorrow; to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon,
breed cattle in the evening and criticize after dinner, just as I please....
"I This is exactly the sense in which average opinion spontaneously
understands freedom: as the right and the opportunity to do just what we wish
and not to have to do anything which we do not wish to do. Said in other terms:
freedom would mean that our own will is the sole norm of our action and that the
will not only can desire anything but also has the chance to carry out its
desire. At this point, however, questions begin to arise: how free is the will
after all? And how reasonable is it? Is an unreasonable will truly a free will?
Is an unreasonable freedom truly freedom? Is it really a good? In order to
prevent the tyranny of unreason must we not complete the definition of freedom
as the capacity to will and to do what we will by placing it in the context of
reason, of the totality of man? And will not the interplay between reason and
will also involve the search for the common reason shared by all men and thus
for the compatibility of liberties? It is obvious that the question of truth is
implicit in the question of the reasonableness of the will and of the will's
link with reason.

It is not merely abstract philosophical considerations, but the quite
concrete situation of our society, which compels us to ask such questions. In
this situation, the demand for freedom remains undiminished, yet doubts about
all the forms of struggle for liberation movements and the systems of freedom
which have existed until now are coming more and more dramatically to the fore.
Let us not forget that Marxism began its career as the one great political force
of our century with the claim that it would usher in a new world of freedom and
of human liberation. It was precisely Marxism's assurance that it knew the
scientifically guaranteed way to freedom and that it would create a new world
which drew many of the boldest minds of our epoch to it. Eventually, Marxism
even came to be seen as the power by which the Christian doctrine of redemption
could finally be transformed into a realistic praxis of liberation—as the
power whereby the kingdom of God could be concretely realized as the true
kingdom of man. The collapse of "real socialism" in the nations of
Eastern Europe has not entirely extirpated such hopes, which quietly survive
here and there while searching for a new face. The political and economic
collapse was not matched by any real intellectual defeat, and in that sense the
question posed by Marxism is still far from being resolved. Nevertheless, the
fact that the Marxist system did not function as had been promised is plain for
all to see. No one can still seriously deny that this ostensible liberation
movement was alongside National Socialism, the greatest system of slavery in
modern history. The extent of its cynical destruction of man and of the
environment is rather shamefacedly kept quiet, but no one can any longer dispute
it.

These developments have brought out the moral superiority of the liberal
system in politics and economics. Nevertheless, this superiority is no occasion
for enthusiasm. The number of those who have no part in the fruits of this
freedom, indeed, who are losing every freedom altogether, is too great:
unemployment is once again becoming a mass phenomenon, and the feeling of not
being needed, of superfluity, tortures men no less than material poverty.
Unscrupulous exploitation is spreading; organized crime takes advantage of the
opportunities of the free and democratic world, and in the midst of all this we
are haunted by the specter of meaninglessness. At the Salzburg University Weeks
of 1995, the Polish philosopher Andrej Szizypiorski unsparingly described the
dilemma of freedom which has arisen after the fall of the Berlin Wall; it is
worth listening to him at somewhat greater length:

It admits of no doubt that capitalism made a great step forward. And it also
admits of no doubt that it has not lived up to what was expected of it. The cry
of the huge masses whose desire has not been fulfilled is a constant refrain in
capitalism.... The downfall of the Soviet conception of the world and of man in
political and social praxis was a liberation of millions of human lives from
slavery. But in the intellectual patrimony of Europe, in the light of the
tradition of the last two hundred years, the anti-Communist revolution also
signals the end of the illusions of the Enlightenment, hence, the destruction of
the intellectual conception which was at the basis of the development of early
modern Europe.... A remarkable, hitherto unprecedented epoch of uniform
development has begun. And it has suddenly become apparent—probably for the
first time in history—that there is only one recipe, one way, one model and
one method of organizing the future. And men have lost their faith in the
meaning of the revolutions which are occurring. They have also lost their hope
that the world can be changed at all and that it is worthwhile changing it....
Today's lack of any alternative, however, leads people to pose completely new
questions. The first question: was the West wrong after all? The second
question: if the West was not right, who, then, was? Because there is no one in
Europe who can doubt that Communism was not right, the third question arises:
can it be that there is no such thing as right? But if this is the case, the
whole intellectual inheritance of the Enlightenment is worthless.... Perhaps the
worn-out steam engine of the Enlightenment, after two centuries of profitable,
trouble-free labor has come to a standstill before our eyes and with our
cooperation. And the steam is simply evaporating. If this is the way things are
in fact, the prospects are gloomy.2

Although many questions could also be posed here in response, the realism and
the logic of Szizypiorski's fundamental queries cannot be brushed aside. At the
same time, his diagnosis is so dismal that we cannot stop there. Was no one
right? Is there perhaps no "right" at all? Are the foundations of the
European Enlightenment, upon which the historical development of freedom rests,
false, or at least deficient? The question "what is freedom?" is in
the end no less complicated than the question "what is truth?". The
dilemma of the Enlightenment, into which we have undeniably fallen, constrains
us to repose these two questions as well as to renew our search for the
connection between them. In order to make headway, we must, therefore,
reconsider the starting-point of the career of freedom in modernity; the course
correction which is plainly needed before paths can reemerge from the darkening
landscape before us must go back to the starting-points themselves and begin its
work there. Of course, in the limited framework of an article I can do no more
than try to highlight a few points. My purpose in this is to convey some sense
of the greatness and the perils of the path of modernity and thereby to
contribute to a new reflection.

II. The problem: The history and concept of freedom in modernity

There is no doubt that from the very outset freedom has been the defining
theme of that epoch which we call modern. The sudden break with the old order to
go off in search of new freedoms is the sole reason which justifies such a
periodization. Luther's polemical writing <Von der Freiheit eines
Christenmenschen [On the Freedom of a Christian]> boldly struck up this theme
in resounding tones.3 It was the cry of freedom which made men sit up and take
notice, which triggered a veritable avalanche and which turned the writings of a
monk into the occasion of a mass movement that radically transformed the face of
the medieval world. At issue was the freedom of conscience vis-a-vis the
authority of the Church, hence the most intimate of all human freedoms. It is
not the order of the community which saves man, but his wholly personal faith in
Christ. That the whole ordered system of the medieval Church ultimately ceased
to count was felt to be a massive impulse of freedom. The order which was in
reality meant to support and save appeared as a burden; it was no longer
binding, that is, it no longer had any redemptive significance. Redemption now
meant liberation, liberation from the yoke of a supra-individual order. Even if
it would not be right to speak of the individualism of the Reformation, the new
importance of the individual and the shift in the relation between individual
conscience and authority are nonetheless among its dominant traits. However,
this liberation movement was restricted to the properly religious sphere. Every
time it was extended into a political program, as in the Peasant War and the
Anabaptist movement, Luther vigorously opposed it. What came to pass in the
political sphere was quite the contrary of liberation: with the creation of
territorial and national Churches the power of the secular authority was
augmented and consolidated. In the Anglo-Saxon world the free churches
subsequently broke out of this new fusion of religious and political government
and thus became precursors of a new construction of history, which later took on
clear features in the second phase of the modern era, the Enlightenment.

Common to the whole Enlightenment is the will to emancipation, first in the
sense of Kant's <sapere aude>—dare to use your reason for yourself. Kant
is urging the individual reason to break free of the bonds of authority, which
must all be subjected to critical scrutiny. Only what is accessible to the eyes
of reason is allowed validity. This philosophical program is by its very nature
a political one as well: reason shall reign, and in the end no other authority
is admitted than that of reason. Only what is accessible to reason has validity;
what is not reasonable, that is, not accessible to reason, cannot be binding
either. This fundamental tendency of the Enlightenment shows up, however, in
diverse, even antithetical, social philosophies and political programs. It seems
to me that we can distinguish two major currents. The first is the Anglo-Saxon
current with its predominantly natural rights orientation and its proclivity
towards constitutional democracy, which it conceives as the only realistic
system of freedom. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the radical approach
of Rousseau, which aims ultimately at complete autarchy. Natural rights thinking
critically applies the criterion of man's innate rights both to positive law and
to the concrete forms of government. These rights are held to be prior to every
legal order and are considered its measure and basis. "Man is created free,
and is skill free, even were he born in chains," says Friedrich Schiller in
this sense. Schiller is not making a statement which consoles slaves with
metaphysical notions, but is offering a principle for fighters, a maxim for
action. A juridical order which creates slavery is an order of injustice. From
creation man has rights which must be enforced if there is to be justice.
Freedom is not bestowed upon man from without. He is a bearer of rights because
he is created free. Such thinking gave rise to the idea of human rights, which
is the Magna Charta of the modern struggle for freedom. When nature is spoken of
in this context what is meant is not simply a system of biological processes.
Rather, the point is that rights are naturally present in man himself prior to
all legal constructs. In this sense, the idea of human rights is in the first
place a revolutionary one: it opposes the absolutism of the state and the
caprice of positive legislation. But it is also a metaphysical idea: there is an
ethical and legal claim in being itself. It is not blind materiality which can
then be formed in accord with pure functionality. Nature contains spirit, ethos
and dignity, and in this way is a juridical claim to our liberation as well as
its measure. In principle, what we find here is very much the concept of nature
in Romans 2. According to this concept, which is inspired by the Stoa and
transformed by the theology of creation, the Gentiles know the law "by
nature" and are thus a law unto themselves (Rom 2:14).

The element specific to the Enlightenment and to modernity in this line of
thought may be seen in the notion that the juridical claim of nature vis-a-vis
the existing forms of government is above all a demand that state and other
institutions respect the rights of the individual. Man's nature is above all to
possess rights against the community, rights which must be protected from the
community: institution seems to be the polar opposite of freedom, whereas the
individual appears as the bearer of freedom, whose goal is seen as his full
emancipation.

This is a point of contact between the first current and the second, which is
far more radical in orientation. For Rousseau, everything which owes its origin
to reason and will is contrary to nature, and corrupts and contradicts it. The
concept of nature is not itself shaped by the idea of a right supposedly
preceding all our institutions as a law of nature. Rousseau's concept of nature
is anti-metaphysical and is correlative to his dream of total, absolutely
unregimented freedom.4 Similar ideas resurface in Nietzsche, who opposes
Dionysian frenzy to Apollonian order, thus conjuring up primordial antitheses in
the history of religions: the order of reason, whose symbolic representation is
Apollo, corrupts the free, unrestrained frenzy of nature.5 Klages reprises the
same motif with his idea that the spirit is the adversary of the soul: the
spirit is not the great new gift wherein alone freedom exists, but is corrosive
of the pristine origin with its passion and freedom.6 In a certain respect this
declaration of war on the spirit is inimical to the Enlightenment, and to that
extent National Socialism, with its hostility towards the Enlightenment and its
worship of "blood and soil," could appeal to currents such as these.
But even here the fundamental motif of the Enlightenment, the cry for freedom,
is not only operative, but occurs in its most radically intensified form. In the
radical politics both of the past and of the present century, various forms of
such tendencies have repeatedly erupted against the democratically domesticated
form of freedom. The French Revolution, which had begun with the idea of a
constitutional democracy, soon cast off these fetters and set out on the path of
Rousseau and of the anarchic conception of freedom; precisely by this move it
became inevitably—a bloody dictatorship.

Marxism too is a continuation of this radical line: it consistently
criticized democratic freedom as a sham and promised a better, more radical
freedom. Indeed, its fascination derived precisely from its promise of a grander
and bolder freedom than is realized in the democracies. Two aspects of the
Marxist system seem to me particularly relevant to the problem of freedom in the
modern period and to the question of truth and freedom.

(1) Marxism proceeds from the principle that freedom is indivisible, hence,
that it exists as such only when it is the freedom of all. Freedom is tied to
equality. The existence of freedom requires before anything else the
establishment of equality. This means that it is necessary to forego freedom in
order to attain the goal of total freedom. The solidarity of those struggling
for the freedom of all comes before the vindication of individual liberties. The
citation from Marx which served as the starting-point for our reflections shows
that the idea of the unbounded freedom of the individual reappears at the end of
the process. For the present however, the norm is the precedence of community,
the subordination of freedom to equality and therefore the right of the
community vis-a-vis the individual.

(2) Bound up with this notion is the assumption that the freedom of the
individual depends upon the structure of the whole and that the struggle for
freedom must be waged not primarily to secure the rights of the individual, but
to change the structure of the world. However, at the question as to how this
structure was supposed to look and what the rational means to bring it about
were, Marxism came up short. For at bottom, even a blind man could see that none
of its structures really makes possible that freedom for whose sake men were
being called upon to forego freedom. But intellectuals are blind when it comes
to their intellectual constructs. For this reason they could forswear every
realism and continue to fight for a system incapable of honoring its promises.
They took refuge in mythology: the new structure, they claimed, would bring
forth a new man—for, as a matter of fact, Marxism's promises could work only
with new men who are entirely different from what they are now. If the moral
character of Marxism lies in the imperative of solidarity and the idea of the
indivisibility of freedom, there is an unmistakable lie in its proclamation of
the new man, a lie which paralyzes even its inchoate ethics. Partial truths are
correlative to a lie, and this fact undoes the whole: any lie about freedom
neutralizes even the elements of truth associated with it. Freedom without truth
is no freedom at all.

Let us stop at this point. We have arrived once more at the very problems
which Szizypiorski formulated so drastically in Salzburg. We now know what the
lie is—at least with respect to the forms in which Marxism has occurred until
now. But we are still far from knowing what the truth is. Indeed, our
apprehension intensifies: is there perhaps no truth at all? Can it be that there
simply is no right at all? Must we content ourselves with a minimal stopgap
social order? But may it be that even such an order does not work, as the latest
developments in the Balkans and in so many other parts of the world show?
Skepticism is growing and the grounds for it are becoming more forcible. At the
same time, the will for the absolute cannot be done away with.

The feeling that democracy is not the right form of freedom is fairly common
and is spreading more and more. The Marxist critique of democracy cannot simply
be brushed aside: how free are elections? To what extent is the outcome
manipulated by advertising, that is, by capital, by a few men who dominate
public opinion? Is there not a new oligarchy who determine what is modern and
progressive, what an enlightened man has to think? The cruelty of this
oligarchy, its power to perform public executions, is notorious enough. Anyone
who might get in its way is a foe of freedom, because, after all, he is
interfering with the free expression of opinion. And how are decisions arrived
at in representative bodies? Who could still believe that the welfare of the
community as a whole truly guides the decision-making process? Who could doubt
the power of special interests, whose dirty hands are exposed with increasing
frequency? And in general, is the system of majority and minority really a
system of freedom? And are not interest groups of every kind appreciably
stronger than the proper organ of political representation, the parliament? In
this tangled power play, the problem of ungovernability arises ever more
menacingly: the will of individuals to prevail over one another blocks the
freedom of the whole.

There is doubtless a flirtation with authoritarian solutions and a flight
from a runaway freedom. But this attitude does not yet define the mind of our
century. The radical current of the Enlightenment has not lost its appeal;
indeed, it is becoming even more powerful. It is precisely in the face of the
limits of democracy that the cry for total freedom gets louder. Today as
yesterday, indeed, increasingly so, "Law and Order" is considered the
antithesis of freedom. Today as yesterday institution, tradition and authority
as such appear to be polar opposites of freedom. The anarchist trend in the
longing for freedom is growing in strength because the ordered forms of communal
freedom are unsatisfactory. The grand promises made at the inception of
modernity have not been kept, yet their fascination is unabated. The
democratically ordered form of freedom can no longer be defended merely by this
or that legal reform. The question goes to the very foundations themselves: it
concerns what man is and how he can live rightly both individually and
collectively.

We see that the political, philosophical and religious problem of freedom has
turned out to be an indissoluble whole; whoever is looking for ways forward must
keep this whole in view and cannot content himself with superficial pragmatisms.
Before attempting in the last part to outline some directions which I see
opening up, I would like to glance briefly at perhaps the most radical
philosophy of freedom in our century, that of J.P. Sartre, inasmuch as it brings
out clearly the full magnitude and seriousness of the question. Sartre regards
man as condemned to freedom. In contrast to the animal, man has no
"nature." The animal lives out its existence according to laws it is
simply born with; it does not need to deliberate what to do with its life. But
man's essence is undetermined. It is an open question. I must decide myself what
I understand by "humanity," what I want to do with it, and how I want
to fashion it. Man has no nature, but is sheer freedom. His life must take some
direction or other, but in the end it comes to nothing. This absurd freedom is
man's hell. What is unsettling about this approach is that it is a way through
the separation of freedom from truth to its most radical conclusion: there is no
truth at all. Freedom has no direction and no measure.7 But this complete
absence of truth, this complete absence of any moral and metaphysical bond, this
absolutely anarchic freedom—which is understood as an essential quality of man—reveals
itself to one who tries to live it not as the supreme enhancement of existence,
but as the frustration of life, the absolute void, the definition of damnation.
The isolation of a radical concept of freedom, which for Sartre was a lived
experience, shows with all desirable clarity that liberation from the truth does
not produce pure freedom, but abolishes it. Anarchic freedom, taken radically,
does not redeem, but makes man a miscarried creature, a pointless being.

III. Truth and freedom

1. On the essence of human freedom

After this attempt to understand the origin of our problems and to get a
clear view of their inner tendency, it is now time to search for answers. It has
become evident that the critical point in the history of freedom in which we now
find ourselves rests upon an unclarified and one-sided idea of freedom. On the
one hand, the concept of freedom has been isolated and thereby falsified:
freedom is a good, but only within a network of other goods together with which
it forms an indissoluble totality. On the other hand, the notion itself has been
narrowly restricted to the rights of individual liberty, and has thus been
robbed of its human truth. I would like to illustrate the problem posed by this
understanding of freedom with the help of a concrete example. At the same time
this example can open the way to a more adequate view of freedom. I mean the
question of abortion. In the radicalization of the individualistic tendency of
the Enlightenment, abortion appears as a right of freedom: the woman must be
able to take charge of herself. She must have the freedom to decide whether she
will bring a child into the world or rid herself of it. She must have the power
to make decisions about her own life, and no one else can—so we are told—impose
from the outside any ultimately binding norm. What is at stake is the right to
self-determination. But is it really the case that the woman who aborts is
making a decision about her own life? Is she not deciding precisely about
someone else—deciding that no freedom shall be granted to another, and that
the space of freedom, which is life, must be taken from him, because it competes
with her own freedom? The question we must therefore ask is this: exactly what
sort of freedom has even the right to annul another's freedom as soon as it
begins?

Now, let it not be said that the issue of abortion concerns a special case
and is not suited to clarify the general problem of freedom. No, it is this very
example which brings out the basic figure of human freedom and makes clear what
is typically human about it. For what is at stake here? The being of another
person is so closely interwoven with the being of this person, the mother, that
for the present it can survive only by physically being with the mother, in a
physical unity with her. Such unity, however, does not eliminate the otherness
of this being or authorize us to dispute its distinct selfhood. However, to be
oneself in this way is to be radically from and through another. Conversely,
this being-with compels the being of the other—that is, the mother—to become
a being-for, which contradicts her own desire to be an independent self and is
thus experienced as the antithesis of her own freedom. We must now add that even
once the child is born and the outer form of its being-from and-with changes, it
remains just as dependent on, and at the mercy of, a being-for. One can, of
course, send the child off to an institution and assign it to the care of
another "for," but the anthropological figure is the same, since there
is still a "from" which demands a "for." I must still accept
the limits of my freedom, or rather, I must live my freedom not out of
competition but in a spirit of mutual support. If we open our eyes, we see that
this, in turn, is true not only of the child, but that the child in the mother's
womb is simply a very graphic depiction of the essence of human existence in
general. Even the adult can exist only with and from another, and is thus
continually thrown back on that being-for which is the very thing he would like
to shut out. Let us say it even more precisely: man quite spontaneously takes
for granted the being-for of others in the form of today's network of service
systems, yet if he had his way he would prefer not to be forced to participate
in such a "from" and "for," but would like to become wholly
independent, and to be able to do and not to do just what he pleases. The
radical demand for freedom, which has proved itself more and more clearly to be
the outcome of the historical course of the Enlightenment, especially of the
line inaugurated by Rousseau, and which today largely shapes the public
mentality, prefers to have neither a whence nor a whither, to be neither from
nor for, but to be wholly at liberty. In other words, it regards what is
actually the fundamental figure of human existence itself as an attack on
freedom which assails it before any individual has a chance to live and act. The
radical cry for freedom demands man's liberation from his very essence as man,
so that he may become the "new man." In the new society, the
dependencies which restrict the I and the necessity of self-giving would no
longer have the right to exist.

"Ye shall be as gods." This promise is quite clearly behind
modernity's radical demand for freedom. Although Ernst Topitsch believed he
could safely say that today no reasonable man still wants to be like or equal to
God, if we look more closely we must assert the exact opposite: the implicit
goal of all of modernity's struggles for freedom is to be at last like a god who
depends on nothing and no one, and whose own freedom is not restricted by that
of another. Once we glimpse this hidden theological core of the radical will to
freedom, we can also discern the fundamental error which still spreads its
influence even where such radical conclusions are not directly willed or are
even rejected. To be totally free, without the competing freedom of others,
without a "from" and a "for"—this desire presupposes not
an image of God, but an idol. The primal error of such a radicalized will to
freedom lies in the idea of a divinity conceived as a pure egoism. The god
thought of in this way is not a God, but an idol. Indeed, it is the image of
what the Christian tradition would call the devil—the anti-God—because it
harbors exactly the radical antithesis to the real God. The real God is by his
very nature entirely being-for (Father), being-from (Son), and being-with (Holy
Spirit). Man, for his part, is God's image precisely insofar as the
"from," "with," and "for" constitute the
fundamental anthropological pattern. Whenever there is an attempt to free
ourselves from this pattern, we are not on our way to divinity, but to
dehumanization, to the destruction of being itself through the destruction of
the truth. The Jacobin variant of the idea of liberation (let us call the
radicalisms of modernity by this name) is a rebellion against man's very being,
a rebellion against truth, which consequently leads man—as Sartre
penetratingly saw—into a self-contradictory existence which we call hell.

The foregoing has made it clear that freedom is tied to a measure, the
measure of reality—to the truth. Freedom to destroy oneself or to destroy
another is not freedom, but its demonic parody. Man's freedom is shared freedom,
freedom in the conjoint existence of liberties which limit and thus sustain one
another. Freedom must measure itself by what I am, by what we are—otherwise it
annuls itself. But having said this, we are now ready to make an essential
correction of the superficial image of freedom which largely dominates the
present: if man's freedom can consist only in the ordered coexistence of
liberties, this means that order—right8—is not the conceptual antithesis of
freedom, but rather its condition, indeed, a constitutive element of freedom
itself. Right is not an obstacle to freedom, but constitutes it. The absence of
right is the absence of freedom.

2. Freedom and responsibility

Admittedly, this insight immediately gives rise to new questions as well:
which right accords with freedom? How must right be structured so as to
constitute a just order of freedom? For there doubtless exists a counterfeit
right, which enslaves and is therefore not right at all but a regulated form of
injustice. Our criticism must not be directed at right—self, inasmuch as right
belongs to the essence of freedom; it must unmask counterfeit right for what it
is and serve to bring to light the true right—that right which is in accord
with the truth and consequently with freedom.

But how do we find this right order? This is the great question of the true
history of freedom, posed at last in its proper form. As we have already done so
far, let us refrain from setting to work with abstract philosophical
considerations. Rather, let us try to approach an answer inductively starting
from the realities of history as they are actually given. If we begin with a
small community of manageable proportions, its possibilities and limits furnish
some basis for finding out which order best serves the shared life of all the
members, so that a common form of freedom emerges from their joint existence.
But no such small community is self-contained; it has its place within larger
orders which, along with other factors, determine its essence. In the age of the
nation—states it was customary to assume that one's own nation was the
standard unit—that its common good was also the right measure of its freedom
as a community. Developments in our century have made it clear that this point
of view is inadequate. Augustine had said on this score that a state which
measures itself only by its common interests and not by justice itself, by true
justice, is not structurally different from a well-organized robber band. After
all, the robber band typically takes as its measure the good of the band
independently of the good of others. Looking back at the colonial period and the
ravages it bequeathed to the world, we see today that even well-ordered and
civilized states were in some respects close to the nature of robber bands
because they thought only in terms of their own good and not of the good itself.
Accordingly, freedom guaranteed in this way accordingly has something of the
brigand's freedom. It is not true, genuinely human freedom. In the search for
the right measure, the whole of humanity must be kept in mind and again—as we
see ever more clearly—the humanity not only of today, but of tomorrow as well.

The criterion of real right—right entitled to call itself true right which
accords with freedom—can therefore only be the good of the whole, the good
itself. On the basis of this insight, Hans Jonas has defined responsibility as
the central concept of ethics.9 This means that in order to understand freedom
properly we must always think of it in tandem with responsibility. Accordingly,
the history of liberation can never occur except as a history of growth in
responsibility. Increase of freedom can no longer lie simply in giving more and
more latitude to individual rights—which leads to absurdity and to the
destruction of those very individual freedoms themselves. Increase in freedom
must be an increase in responsibility, which includes acceptance of the ever
greater bonds required both by the claims of humanity's shared existence and by
conformity to man's essence. If responsibility is answering to the truth of
man's being, then we can say that an essential component of the history of
liberation is ongoing purification for the sake of the truth. The true history
of freedom consists in the purification of individuals and of institutions
through this truth.

The principle of responsibility sets up a framework which needs to be filled
by some content. This is the context in which we have to look at the proposal
for the development of a planetary ethos, for which Hans Kung has been the
preeminent and passionately committed spokesman. It is no doubt sensible,
indeed, in our present situation necessary, to search for the basic elements
common to the ethical traditions of the various religions and cultures. In this
sense, such an endeavor is by all means important and appropriate. On the other
hand, the limits of this sort of enterprise are evident; Joachim Fest, among
others, has called attention to these limits in a sympathetic, but also very
pessimistic analysis, whose general drift comes quite close to the skepticism of
Szizypiorski.10 For this ethical minimum distilled from the world religions
lacks first of all the bindingness, the intrinsic authority, which is a
prerequisite of ethics. Despite every effort to reach a clearly understandable
position, it also lacks the obviousness to reason which, in the opinion of the
authors, could and should replace authority; it also lacks the concreteness
without which ethics cannot come into its own.

<One> idea, which is implicit in this experiment, seems to me correct:
reason must listen to the great religious traditions if it does not wish to
become deaf, dumb and blind precisely to what is essential about human
existence. There is no great philosophy which does not draw life from listening
to and accepting religious tradition. Wherever this relation is cut off,
philosophical thought withers and becomes a mere conceptual game.11 The very
theme of responsibility, that is, the question of anchoring freedom in the truth
of the good, of man and of the world, reveals very clearly the necessity of such
attentive listening. For, although the general approach of the principle of
responsibility is very much to the point, it is still a question of how we are
supposed to get a comprehensive view of what is good for all-good not only for
today, but also for tomorrow. A twofold danger lies in wait here. On the one
hand there is the risk of sliding into consequentialism, which the pope rightly
criticizes in his moral encyclical (VS, nn. 71-83). Man simply overreaches
himself if he believes that he can assess the whole range of consequences
resulting from his action and make them the norm of his freedom. In doing so he
sacrifices the present to the future, while also failing even to construct the
future. On the other hand, who decides what our responsibility enjoins? When the
truth is no longer seen in the context of an intelligent appropriation of the
great traditions of belief, it is replaced by consensus. But once again we must
ask: whose consensus? The common answer is the consensus of those capable of
rational argument. Because it is impossible to ignore the elitist arrogance of
such an intellectual dictatorship, it is then said that those capable of
rational argument would also have to engage in "advocacy" on behalf of
those who are not. This whole line of thought can hardly inspire confidence. The
fragility of consensuses and the ease with which in a certain intellectual
climate partisan groups can assert their claim to be the sole rightful
representatives of progress and responsibility are plain for all to see. It is
all too easy here to drive out the devil with Beelzebub; it is all too easy to
replace the demon of bygone intellectual systems with seven new and worse ones.

3. The truth of our humanity

How we are to establish the right relationship between responsibility and
freedom cannot be settled simply by means of a calculus of effects. We must
return to the idea that man's freedom is a freedom in the coexistence of
freedoms; only thus is it true, that is, in conformity with the authentic
reality of man. It follows that it is by no means necessary to seek outside
elements in order to correct the freedom of the individual. Otherwise, freedom
and responsibility, freedom and truth, would be perpetual opposites, which they
are not. Properly understood, the reality of the individual itself includes
reference to the whole, to the other. Accordingly, our answer to the question
above is that there is a common truth of a single humanity present in every man.
The tradition has called this truth man's "nature." Basing ourselves
on faith in creation, we can formulate this point even more clearly: there is
one divine idea, "man," to which it is our task to answer. In this
idea, freedom and community, order and concern for the future, are a single
whole.

Responsibility would thus mean to live our being as an answer—as a response
to what we are in truth. This one truth of man, in which freedom and the good of
all are inextricably correlative, is centrally expressed in the biblical
tradition in the Decalogue, which, by the way, coincides in many respects with
the great ethical traditions of other religions. The Decalogue is at once the
self-presentation and self-exhibition of God and the exposition of what man is,
the luminous manifestation of his truth. This truth becomes visible in the
mirror of God's essence, because man can be rightly understood only in relation
to God. To live the Decalogue means to live our God-likeness, to correspond to
the truth of our being and thus to do the good. Said in yet another way, to live
the Decalogue means to live the divinity of man, which is the very definition of
freedom: the fusion of our being with the divine being and the resulting harmony
of all with all (CCC, nn. 2052-82).

In order to understand this statement aright, we must add a further remark.
Every significant human word reaches into greater depths beyond what the speaker
is immediately conscious of saying: in what is said there is always an excess of
the unsaid, which allows the words to grow as the ages go forward. If this is
true even of human speech, it must <a fortiori> be true of the word which
comes out of the depths of God. The Decalogue is never simply understood once
and for all. In the successive, changing situations where responsibility is
exercised historically the Decalogue appears in ever new perspectives, and ever
new dimensions of its significance are opened. Man is led into the whole of the
truth, truth which could by no means be borne in just one historical moment
alone (cf. Jn 16:12f.). For the Christian, the exegesis of the Decalogue
accomplished in the words, life, passion, and Resurrection of Christ is the
decisive interpretive authority, which a hitherto unsuspected depth opens up.
Consequently, man's listening to the message of faith is not the passive
registering of otherwise unknown information, but the resuscitation of our
choked memory and the opening of the powers of understanding which await the
light of the truth in us. Hence, such understanding is a supremely active
process, in which reason's entire quest for the criteria of our responsibility
truly comes into its own for the first time. Reason's quest is not stifled, but
is freed from circling helplessly in impenetrable darkness and set on its way.
If the Decalogue, unfolded in rational understanding, is the answer to the
intrinsic requirements of our essence, then it is not the counter-pole of our
freedom, but its real form. It is, in other words, the foundation of every just
order of freedom and the true liberating power in human history.

IV. Summary of the results

"Perhaps the worn-out steam engine of the Enlightenment, after two
centuries of profitable, trouble-free labor has come to a standstill before our
eyes and with our cooperation. And the steam is simply evaporating." This
is Szizypiorski's pessimistic diagnosis, which we had encountered at the
beginning as an invitation to reflection. Now, I would say that the operation of
this machine was never trouble-free let us think only of the two World Wars of
our century and of the dictatorships which we have witnessed. But I would add
that we by no means need to retire the whole inheritance of the Enlightenment as
such from service and pronounce it a worn-out steam engine. What we do need,
however, is a course correction on three essential points, with which I would
like to sum up the yield of my reflections.

(1) An understanding of freedom which tends to regard liberation exclusively
as the ever more sweeping annulment of norms and the constant extension of
individual liberties to the point of complete emancipation from all order is
false. Freedom, if it is not to lead to deceit and self-destruction, must orient
itself by the truth, that is, by what we really are, and must correspond to our
being. Since man's essence consists in being-from, being-with and being-for,
human freedom can exist only in the ordered communion of freedoms. Right is
therefore not antithetical to freedom, but is a condition, indeed, a
constitutive element of freedom itself. Liberation does not lie in the gradual
abolition of right and of norms, but in the purification of ourselves and of the
norms so that they will make possible the humane coexistence of freedoms.

(2) A further point follows from the truth of our essential being: there will
never be an absolutely ideal state of things within our human history, and the
definitive order of freedom will never be established. Man is always underway
and always finite. Szizypiorski, considering both the notorious injustice of the
socialist order and all the problems of the liberal order, had posed the
doubt-filled question: what if there is no right order at all? Our response must
now be that, in fact, the absolutely ideal order of things, which is right in
all respects, will never exist.12 Whoever claims that it will is not telling the
truth. Faith in progress is not false in every respect. What is false, however,
is the myth of the liberated world of the future, in which everything will be
different and good. We can erect only relative orders, which can never be and
embody right except in their relative way. But we must strive precisely for this
best possible approximation to what is truly right. Nothing else, no
inner-historical eschatology, liberates, but it deceives and therefore enslaves.
For this reason, the mythic luster attached to concepts such as change and
revolution must be demythologized. Change is not a good in itself. Whether it is
good or bad depends upon its concrete contents and points of reference. The
opinion that the essential task in the struggle for freedom is to change the
world is—I repeat—a myth. History will always have its vicissitudes. When it
comes to man's ethical nature in the strict sense, things do not proceed in a
straight line, but in cycles. It is our task always to struggle in the present
for the relatively best constitution of man's shared existence and in so doing
to preserve the good we have already achieved, to overcome existing ills, and to
resist the in-breaking of the forces of destruction.

(3) We must also lay to rest once and for all the dream of the absolute
autonomy and self-sufficiency of reason. Human reason needs the support of the
great religious traditions of humanity. It will, of course, examine critically
the individual religious traditions. The pathology of religion is the most
dangerous sickness of the human mind. It exists in the religions, but it also
exists precisely where religion as such is rejected and the status of an
absolute is assigned to relative goods: the atheistic systems of modernity are
the most terrifying examples of a religious passion alienated from its nature,
which is a life-threatening sickness of the human mind. Where God is denied,
freedom is not built up, but robbed of its foundation and thus distorted.13
Where the purest and deepest religious traditions are entirely discarded, man
severs himself from his truth, he lives contrary to it and becomes unfree. Even
philosophical ethics cannot be unqualifiedly autonomous. It cannot renounce the
idea of God or the idea of a truth of being having an ethical character.14 If
there is no truth about man, man also has no freedom. Only the truth makes us
free.

Translated by Adrian Walker

Endnotes

1 K. Marx and F. Engels, Werke, 39 vols. (Berlin, 1961-71), 3:33.

2 I cite Szizypiorski from the manuscript provided during the University
Weeks.

8 ["Right" renders the German "Recht." Although the term
"Recht" can mean "right" in the sense of "human
rights," it may also be used to mean "law," with the more or less
explicit connotation of "just order," "order embodying what is
right." It is in this latter sense that Ratzinger takes "Recht"
both here and in the following discussion; "Recht" has been translated
in this context either as "right" or (less frequently) as "just
order" or a variant thereof.-Tr.]

9 H. Jonas, <Das Prinzip Verantwortung> (Frankfurt a.M., 1979).

10 J. Fest, <Die schwierige Freiheit> (Berlin, 1993), esp. 47-81. Fest
sums up his observations on Kung's "planetary ethos": "The
farther the agreements—which cannot be reached without concessions—are
pushed, the more elastic and consequently the more impotent the ethical norms
become, to the point that the project finally amounts to a mere corroboration of
that unbinding morality which is not the goal, but the problem" (80).

11 See the penetrating remarks on this point in J. Pieper, <Schriften zum
Philosophiebegriff> III, ed. B. Wald (Hamburg, 1995), 300-323, as well as
15-70, esp. 59ff.

13 Cf. J. Fest, <Die schwierige Freiheit,> 79: "None of the
appeals addressed to man is able to say how he can live without a beyond,
without fear of the last day and yet time after time act against his own
interests and desires." Cf. also L. Kolakowski, <Falls es keinen Gott
gibt> (Munchen, 1982).

14 Cf. J. Pieper, <Schriften zum Philosophiebegriff> III.

This article was taken from the Spring 1996 issue of "Communio:
International Catholic Review". To subscribe write Communio, P.O. Box 4557,
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